MUHAMMED Vs. KUNHAYISHA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) IS a Muslim daughter, notwithstanding the fact that she has attained majority and notwithstanding the fact that she suffers from no physical or mental abnormality or injury, entitled to claim maintenance under Section 125 Cr.P.C. ? Does the decision of the Supreme Court reported in Noor Saba Khatoon v. Mohd. Quasim, 1997(3) RCR(Criminal) 756 (SC) : (1997 SCC (Crl) 924), confer on her any such right ? These are the questions that fall for determination in this revision petition.

(2.) FUNDAMENTAL facts are all admitted. The parties are referred to in this order in the manner in which they are ranked before the Family Court. The second petitioner is aged 20 years. She is the daughter of the counter petitioner (revision petitioner herein). She along with her mother claimed maintenance under Section 125 Cr.P.C. The mother's claim for maintenance was turned down. That rejection has now become final without challenge. I need not hence advert to her claim at all.

(3.) I have been taken through the provisions of Section 125 Cr.P.C. The Legislature has advisedly chosen to employ expressions and terminology in the 1973 Code armed with the wisdom and expertise gained from the working of Section 488 of the earlier Code. Section 125 Cr.P.C. is a piece of secular law applicable to all persons in India whatever be their religious faith. Chapter IX of the Cr.P.C. though it appears in the procedural/adjactival Code confers substantive rights and provides a machinery for enforcement of such rights. To maintain one's own wife/child/parent etc. may have been the duty under the personal law or purely under the norms of morality of the Society earlier. But under Section 125 it is made the legal duty of all Indians. It is a futile exercise to look for authority under the personal law for the statutory stipulations in Chapter IX. That is, according to me, an unnecessary exercise. Whatever be the basis or the rationale which prompted the Parliament to impose such a duty on the parent/husband/children to maintain their children/wife/parents, it remains that Chapter IX creates such statutory liability and seeks to enforce the same through the criminal adjudicatory process. It is true that Courts have on some occasions, unnecessarily perhaps, looked up to the personal law to discover/invent the basis or rationale of the provisions of Chapter IX. But whether such rationale basis exists or not, it is very evident that Section 125 Cr.P.C. obliges every person to maintain the persons specified in clauses (a) to (d) of Section 125(1). Parliament's competence to impose such a duty on all is beyond controversy.